MUCH OF Indian television is laughable. You spend hours tittering at
gurus with wild hairdos and at astrologers who exhort you to avoid
sex during rahu kaal, and many more wondering why anchors on
news channels shriek, and if their great urgency indicates an incipient urge
to visit the bathroom.

Which brings you to Channel V’s Tony B, who makes it a point to let the
viewer know, in a weird accent replete with mispronunciations, misplaced
articles and malapropisms, when it’s
time to “be going to the bathroom and
doing the necessary thing”. A first-time
viewer might take a while to gauge the
tone of this new show. Tony B aka
Aniruddha Bahal — a journalist known
for sting operations, for winning the
2003 Bad Sex in Fiction Award for Bunker 13 and, currently, as editor-inchief
of Cobrapost — manages to make
his ridiculous disguise of ill-fitting wig,
ugly suit and outsized YSL (no less!)
glasses entirely believable. You are even
taken in by the accent… for the first
five seconds.

Tony B’s interviewees, however,
aren’t as adept at spotting that they’re
being needled: Manish Arora begins
slowly to froth at the mouth as 41-yearold
Bahal’s oafish persona asks, “How
many hot cot you make?” “Haute couture,”
Arora corrects him, with a sneer.

“He kept correcting everything I
said… because he didn’t want to look
bad!” laughs Bahal, who clearly has a
finely-tuned bulls**t metre — a quality
that probably makes it harder to maintain
the accent and that straight face.

“Many of the show’s funny situations
grow out of interviewees’ desperate urge to appear to be ‘in’. So, if I ask them
what they think of the Dalai Lama being detained in Singur (which, sigh,
never happened), they react to it. It’s surreal. People find it difficult to admit
they don’t know about something. They’d rather admit to a falsity,” he says,
adding that most people are mortally afraid of appearing unsophisticated.

Bahal’s exploration of this rich vein of intellectual status anxiety is what
gives the Tony B show its edge. “It was a challenge because it’s unscripted
humour. At the same time, these are also interviews. So you have to walk a
very careful faultline, and you have to be conscious,” says Bahal, who believes
he’s taken the unscripted humour format further than the UK’s Sacha Baron
Cohen. Cohen’s manic Ali G sketches used the device of the unreliable anchor
to demolish everyone from politicians to pop culture figures, but lasted
about 5 minutes each. “Nobody’s managed to sustain it for half an hour,” he
says. “Very the true,” you mumble in a pale imitation of Tony B’s over-the-top mofussil accent.